A Town Full of Dead Mexicans: the Salinas Valley

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A Town Full of Dead Mexicans: the Salinas Valley The Western History Association A Town Full of Dead Mexicans: The Salinas Valley Bracero Tragedy of 1963, the End of the Bracero Program, and the Evolution of California's Chicano Movement Author(s): Lori A. Flores Source: The Western Historical Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Summer 2013), pp. 124-143 Published by: Western Historical Quarterly, Utah State University on behalf of The Western History Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/westhistquar.44.2.0124 Accessed: 05-09-2015 22:23 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Western Historical Quarterly, Utah State University and The Western History Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Western Historical Quarterly. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 129.49.5.35 on Sat, 05 Sep 2015 22:23:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Figure 1. Braceros enter a converted truck-bus after eating lunch on the edge of a Salinas Valley field, 1956, by Leonard Nadel, Leonard Nadel Collection, Bracero History Archive, Division of Work & Industry, National museum of American History, item 2434. Photo courtesy of Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. This content downloaded from 129.49.5.35 on Sat, 05 Sep 2015 22:23:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions A Town Full of Dead mexicans: The Salinas Valley Bracero Tragedy of 1963, the end of the Bracero Program, and the evolution of California’s Chicano movement Lori A. Flores In 1963 a horrific accident took the lives of almost three dozen Mexican guest workers, or braceros, in California’s Salinas Valley. This article examines the event’s effects on various communities in the United States, including policy makers, civil rights activists, and farmworkers, while considering questions of race and labor, tragedy and historical memory, and the evolution of Chicano politics in California. En 1963 un accidente terrible tomó las vidas de casi tres docenas de traba- jadores mexicanos, o braceros, en el Valle de Salinas en California. Este artí- culo examina los efectos de este evento en varias comunidades en los Estados Unidos, incluyendo los políticos, activistas de derechos civiles, y los campesinos. Además considera cuestiones de relaciones raciales y laborales, tragedia y memoria histórica, y la evolución del movimiento Chicano en California. They are viewed as commodities, as objects, as chattels . the average bracero- holder probably has less respect for his chattels than the average slave-holder had for his a hundred years ago. You rent a bracero for six weeks or six months, and if he gets damaged, you don’t care. You’ll never see him again. You get next year’s model—a newer, younger, healthier one. —Henry Anderson, Advisory Board of Citizens for Farm Labor1 Lori A. Flores, assistant professor of history at SuNY Stony Brook, wishes to thank the archivists and interviewees who enriched the content of this piece; the various readers, including Albert Camarillo, estelle Freedman, Stephen Pitti, William Deverell, David Torres-rouff, Beth Lew-Williams, Timothy Tomlinson, Kevin Kim, Julie Prieto, and Josh Howe, who improved its Western Historical Quarterly 44 (Summer 2013): 125–143. Copyright © 2013, Western History Association. This content downloaded from 129.49.5.35 on Sat, 05 Sep 2015 22:23:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 126 Summer 2013 Western Historical Quarterly in the early morning hours of 17 September 1963, the crew of male mexican guest workers (or braceros) who lived at the earl meyers Company labor camp in Salinas, California, boarded a bus to begin their work in two local vegetable fields. After a ten-hour workday harvesting celery and other crops, the men reboarded the vehicle near the town of Chualar, twelve miles south of Salinas. This “bus,” a flatbed produce truck with an affixed canopy and two long, wooden benches inside, was one of many converted vehicles growers used to transport braceros throughout California. (See figure 1.) The fifty-seven men crammed into the back, some sitting on the floor next to long harvesting knives or atop large food con- tainers. A chain tied on the outside of the back doors kept the workers locked in the compartment, and the crew could not communicate with their driver and foreman, thirty-four-year-old Francisco “Pancho” espinosa, or thirty-two-year-old co-foreman Arturo Galindo, sitting next to espinosa in the passenger seat checking timesheets.2 Between 4:20 and 4:25 p.m., espinosa approached an unmarked railroad cross- ing eight miles south of Salinas. Not seeing or hearing a train, he inched the front wheels over the tracks. He suddenly heard a whistle but still did not see anything. espinosa gunned the motor to get across, but it was too late. A seventy-one-car Southern Pacificr ailroad freight train, traveling at sixty-five miles an hour, smashed into the right side of the vehicle with enough force to shear it in half. The passenger compartment detached, sending bodies, pieces of wood, and work tools flying. Before the engineer could bring the train carrying sugar beets to a stop, fifty-six men lay scattered around the tracks, some thrown three hundred feet beyond the point of impact. Twenty-three died instantly. Tony Vásquez, a mexican American foreman whose crew was thinning broccoli in a nearby field, witnessed the collision in hor- ror and called authorities before rushing to the scene. “Bodies just flew all over the place,” he said. A truckload of soldiers from nearby Fort Ord saw the wreckage from the highway and stopped to offer aid. meanwhile, other drivers slowed their cars to observe the accident, delaying ambulances trying to reach the workers. Paramedics and monterey County Coroner Christopher Hill came upon a gruesome scene: “One body was hooked under the engine. Shoes, hats and cutting knives were all around. everywhere you could hear the injured moaning.” As daylight faded, fifteen ambu- lances and several local residents with vehicles removed the dead and transported the injured to multiple Salinas hospitals, where three men died on arrival and two more died in surgery. Ambulance driver Gene Hopkins recounted the stories his cowork- ers told him about the tragedy: “They said that when they brought one ambulance analysis; and graphic/map designer David Hackett. 1 Henry Anderson, “Blood on the Lettuce,” 18 September 1963, transcript of radio broad- cast, 2, folder 3, box 11, ernesto Galarza Papers, Department of Special Collections, Stanford university (hereafter Galarza Papers). 2 “Crash Kills 27: Train Smashes makeshift Bus,” Los Angeles Times, 18 September 1963. This content downloaded from 129.49.5.35 on Sat, 05 Sep 2015 22:23:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Lori A. Flores 127 back to the garage from transporting the victims, they opened the back doors and the blood flowed out like water.”3 The dead braceros, hailing from the mexican states of Jalisco, Guanajuato, Sonora, Zacatecas, Puebla, and michoacán, ranged in age from nineteen to fifty-nine. José Gómez martÍnez died on his twenty-seventh birthday. Out of three pairs of brothers who had been riding in the bus, Federico and Salvador Olmedo Gallegos perished while José meza Huerta and Salvador Orozco Contreras lost their brothers roberto and Luis.4 Only one person was unharmed in the collision: espinosa, the driver. Although in shock, he emerged from the bus with only minor cuts and bruises. After responding to two rounds of questioning by the California Highway Patrol (CHP) and the monterey County dis- trict attorney, espinosa was arrested and placed in the Salinas jail on charges of felony manslaughter. He, along with the bracero guest worker program at large, would become the central figures of blame in what the CHP deemed “the biggest single fatal vehicle accident in the history of California.” 5 Some scholars have recognized the Chualar accident as an important event within the history of the Bracero Program (1942–1964), yet analysis of the event has been limited to details of the accident and the program’s lack of enforcement mechanisms for ensur- ing braceros’ safety.6 This article provides a critical examination of the 1963 accident, the communities involved in and affected by the incident, and the role this event played in the death of the Bracero Program and the evolution of California’s Chicano move- ment. The Chualar tragedy reminded the nation of braceros’ exploitation and vulner- ability as guest workers in the united States. Likewise, the accident revealed the Salinas Valley—long praised as the “Salad Bowl of the World” for its agricultural production—as a dark nexus of farmworker mistreatment. Desperate to maintain their access to cheap mexican labor, Salinas growers and officials attempted to control public opinion of the accident by handling the bracero victims’ funeral, impeding federal investigations, and silencing the crash survivors. Yet they could not escape critiques from union leaders, religious representatives, and mexican American political activists who argued that Chualar was only symptomatic of the larger transnational tragedy that was the Bracero Program, which simultaneously exploited mexican laborers and displaced u.S. workers 3 “27 mexican Celery Workers Die as Train Hits Bus in California,” New York Times, 18 September 1963; “Crash Kills 27”; and Gene Hopkins, interview by author, 28 June 2009.
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